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Ask Dr. Vinton Cerf About the Internet
If anyone can claim to have "invented the Internet," (or at least to have co-invented it) it's Vint Cerf, who never makes this claim himself. But he's certainly had a hand in shaping most of what we call "the Internet" today, and is now working on taking the Internet or something like it to Mars and other planets. A Google Search for "Vint Cerf" brings up thousands of responses, so you should have no trouble coming up with a unique, interesting question for him. (As is usual with Slashdot interviews, we'll send 10 of the top-moderated questions to Dr. Cerf about 24 hours after this post, and publish his answers shortly after he gets them back to us.)
What was it like working with Al Gore?
There are 01 kinds of cars in the world. The General Lee, and everything else.
Dr. Cerf,
do you believe that the proliferation of internet will give rise to numerous GPS/IP points of contacts for each person, object, etc? I could see a myriad uses for this technology, real time tracking of people, real time product distribution, etc. There are obviously privacy issues but is there anyone in the industry developing prodcuts or solutions for this market?
Unix has always been helpful with the invention of the Internet as well as it's implimentation, from the first versions from AT&T all the way to Linux, all the BSDs, and more. With the continuing work, will further technologies be enhanced now that we have the free/open sourced Unix implementations? As is, I belive we have a working IP6 stack in Linux.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Although there's a certain moral argument to an individual's right to privacy, there's also a statistical argument that people simply act irresponsibly when given anonymnity.
What's your take on anonymnity in the internent? Is a good thing? A bad thing? Just a thing not worth talking about?
Hindsight being 20/20. What is the #1 thing you would change about the internet if you could go back to the early days?
Dan Bricker
My new title at the office is "Vice-President of Everything Else"
that we are "Cerf"ing the net? (sorry, i had to say it)
What is your perspective on DRM? Specifically, do you think that the Fritz chip, Palladium, and lobbying of the MPAA/RIAA, will change the Internet fundamentally? Can the Internet be tamed at this point? If so, do you find this DRM and such to infringe upon fair use? Is there legitamacy to the common fear that in the future, computers themselves, in order to gain access to the Internet, will have so many restrictions that the Internet itself will begin to suffer from it?
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
Two questions....
1)Did you ever work with Al Gore? (not really a question)
2)How would we tansmit (speeds, reliability, etc) from Mars to Earth? To me it seems that with solar flares and metors, reliability would be low. Also how will you be able to get a reliable test of connection from Earth to Mars? How would we test this connection without being on Mars?
Do you think the Internet has changed the world? Is it now a better place?
As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982-1986, you led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet.
As most engineers know, we have to make some sacrifices with every project and get rid of certain features that we had hoped would be there but cannot due to monetary constraints, etc.
Could you explain some of the more difficult decisions you had to make as the head of this particular project? Moreover, was there ever a point in the project where no one thought the final product was viable?
Thanks.
Do you use AOL Instant Messenger?
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
What do you see happening over the next few years in the battle between the Internet Protocol community (computing/telecom hardware manufacturers, service providers, users) and the Intellectual Property industry (RIAA/MPAA/etc.)?
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considering your work with TCP/IP protocols what would you change now that you can look back retrospectively to how it has been used/misused. What would you incorporate into designs now that weren't even thought of at the time that TCP/IP was created?
Since the beginning the net has been ever-evolving by leaps and bounds. What single innovation/technology do you think has had the most profound effect on the net as a whole?
(i.e.: xml, php/asp, etc...)
I would like to know what thing you would change in the modern Internet that you think would make it better. Less regulation? A different protocol? A method of removing vulnerable points to eliminate certain types of network-based attacks? Built-in encryption? Or something else entirely that most users haven't even dreamed up yet?
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
What do you think about big media corporations attempting to wrest control of the internet away from the rest of the world?
Any sufficiently advanced influence is indistinguishable from control.
Mr. Cerf, in light of the copyright battles, DMCA, legal battles, etc., surrounding organizations like RIAA, MPAA, etc., as well as the increasing popularity of broadband and wireless, what do you see the Internet as in five years?
Of all of the surprising uses that people have invented for the Internet, which surprised you the most (good or bad)?
It brought the net to the masses.
No matter the hype, the pros and cons, the rather primitive, raw and clumsy IP protocol proved its way. And the most fantastic is that its broadcast nature, what some people considered a drawback, proved to be one of its main advantages. We have seen it covering the whole world, proving its ideology on wars (well IP was a DoD protocol for a war situation wasn't it?) and even reaching Mars. However this same primitive, raw and clumsy nature keeps on... And we see lots of troubles on security, performance and reliability. It seems that even Mars is something harder for IP to reach.
Well, is IP protocol The Wheel? And is will this wheel be always a near-round polygon with several holes on it? Isn't any avenue of future for a better protocol? Will we see "ping Mars - timeout, timeout, timeout, timeout - 48 minutes - Mars pinged 80% lost packets" as a common reality?
If you could revise Hafner and Lyon's book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet", what changes would you make?
- Tim
The Internet has moved from a research project to a part of mainstream life in less than a decade. Even the "Digital Divide" has turned out to be less of a problem than feared, with most schools and libraries (at least in the U.S.) providing access to anyone who wants it. Pretty impressive.
But what about the development of the Internet has disappointed you? Commercial dominance? Trivialization of the new resource? "Digital Divide"? Security problems? The Microsoft monoculture? The hype of the bubble circa 1999?
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In the earlier days, did you ever think that 32 bits for IP addressing would eventually not be enough for everybody?
It's worth noting that he wrote those words when Clinton was still President and Gore -- you know, the elected President of the United States -- was still VP. Makes me nostalgic for the days when we had an administration that wasn't living in the Dark Ages. [sigh]
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
IPv6 holds solutions to many of the problems the Internet faces today; but it's still almost exclusively an IPv4 world out there. The usual vicious cycle applies: no one wants to support it until it's widely used, and no one wants to use it until it's widely supported. How, and when, do you see this logjam being broken up?
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
I never thought I'd be able to e-mail my mother. I never though I'd be able to access the public library's "card" catalog from home. I never thought there'd be a more compelling screen than my television set for wasting time.-)
How do you find yourself using the Internet, in ways that would have surprised you a decade ago?
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It is a long time rumor that the Arpanet (the predecessor to the current day Internet) was designed to survive a nuclear attack which could "disable" a number of nodes. However, taking into account changes which have had to happen with the evolution of the Internet (for example, the closure of 'open relay mail servers' which could have 'bounced' the email around 'dead or unreachable nodes', plus the 'sudden' closure of major backbone providers such as KPNQwest) - do you think the Internet could still survive a major 'node failure'?
The internet, in order to work even at the most basic technical level, needs some standards; some governace. What do you think is the proper scope of that governace/standard setting, who are the constituents, and what are the proper mechanisms for governing?
How do they differ from what we have to day? On the whole, are you optimistic or pessimistic about all this?
How do you feel about the proliferation of the "web" and how it has more or less overshadowed "the internet" for the vast majority of the "wired" portion of humanity? Has the amount of frivilous crap that has been allowed to flow over the wires benefitted or people or not, verses if the internet was still just for scientists and students and was restricted to services such as connecting computers for colaberative use and sharing of files that no one is going to get sued over?
Seeing how there's so much interesting information to be found on the net ('interesting' being good or bad, depending), what do you think about mandatory filtering on public (library, etc) computers? Whose responsability is it to decide what we can and can't see?
Triv
What's your take on the ICANN events? The elections, the resolution protocols, etc.? Do you think they are an effective body?
Dear Dr Cerf
Last year, Jay Brockman and colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana sent out packets with carefully crafted checksums such that only the packet with the checksum which solved their mathematical problem returned an ack packet.
article here
this kind of distributed brute force search could be useful in the huge search spaces of ai.
Furthermore, instead of a single computer pretending it is a neural network, a different application of distributed parasitic computing could allow a network of computers to be tricked into having each computer spend a few clock cycles pretending it is a neuron.
Would you support the development future network protocols which encourage these kind of facilities?
Thanks
Not necessarily what you're working on next (although that would be interesting), but what do you think might be the next really big thing? What will be the next technological achievement to affect all of humanity? Are there any projects out there that are still small, like the internet was in the 70's and 80's, but which you believe may mushroom into a world-changing invention?
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
In a recent presentation with John Chambers of Cisco, he claimed that streaming media on demand, and therefore, digital rights protection was necessary to grow the Internet into the next phase. Many other people have the idea that the computer and the television should merge before the Internet will "advance."
Others take the Sony approach: the Internet will advance when we can use it as a facilitator -- such as being able to store photos or video from handheld cameras to servers, or access it from cell phones and PDAs for messaging and Bluetooth-type functionality.
Are there other approaches that you've seen (or considered!) for utilization of the Internet that don't head down these two widely-touted avenues?
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
TCP/IP was originally designed as interim solution until OSI could be finished. When do you expect that to happen?
"The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson
I never ask a question. I want to ask a question.
When you were doing all the initial work, putting things together, and figuring out how things 'should' be, did you ever consider how easy it would become?
I mean, did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine AOL, or something like it? Instant Messaging, Plug and Play, and everything else? To me, back in the good old days (tm) the obfuscation of computer networking was a boon, even in the early '90's. Like Usenet before 1996. I'll admit to enjoying things maybe a bit more when everyone and their grandmother didn't contribute to discussions with one sided opinions in all caps.
So, I guess it's a to part question - did you ever imagine it becoming so easy, and do you wish it had stayed harder?
What do you think about Distributed.net and other distributed computing projects that utilize the internet? At any point during your work before the mid-90's, did you ever invision such a concept as distributed computing over a worldwide inter-network being a viable alternative to expensive supercomputers?
Building on that last question, did you at any time consider the possibility of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against a single host on the inter-network, or against the inter-network as a whole? If so, what, if any safeguards did you consider implementing to protect against such problems?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Another person often dubbed "creator of the internet" was Jon Postel. How would you compare your role with his; and, if you can answer such a loaded question, if the internet had to be invented without one of you, which person (not being involved) would constitute a greater loss?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
The Secret Service/NSA/FBI/CIA assure us that evil criminal masterminds and cyberterrorists are poised to take down the internet and cripple the global economy at any moment. Given the accuracy of their past predictions, this too will surely come to pass. When it does, the government will need a scapegoat, and fast. I think we know who that will be.
My question is: where do you plan to hide, what psueodonym will you adopt, and will you be travelling in company with Al Gore?
Don't worry, we won't tell them. This is just between you and us.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Information Superhighway
Cyberspace
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
rooooar
Is the IP address shortage a real technical problem or is it simply a managment issue thats hiding under the excuse that "routers can't cope with large route tables" combined with our current routing infastructure?
In the future, so you see the Internet envolving in a evolutionary fashion, or are revolutionary changes in store?
One the one hand, you're well-respected in technical circles for your engineer efforts in the early days of the internet, and generally thought of as a correct and forward-thinking person. On the other hand, you were employed for most of recent history (perhaps still?) by MCI/WorldCom, who've been accused of being shortsighted in many ways, and not very true to the spirit of the net. How do you reconcile these things? Do you have any say or sway?
11*43+456^2
In ten years, do you think that the average person's use of the Internet will be similar to today, or will it be drastically different?
We've heard the hype and the 'plans' to move to IPv6 for years now, but the USA seems fairly complacent at IPv4. Do you see IPv6 becoming a reality in the near future (2 to 3 years), and from a high perspective, what do you think (besides the obvious running out of addresses) could spur the movement? Or should we not move at all, and depend on network address translation more?
"Powers. I have them."
How do you feel about the fact that many people think of the World Wide Web and the Internet as the same thing?
Email, FTP and even chat protocols seem to be more and more mediated by an HTTP interface. Is this just the price of making the 'Net available to more people, or do you think there is a chance for a non WWW or WWW-workalike to get significant public use?
All's true that is mistrusted
What progress is being made in architecting security in the Internet in regards to protocol 'attacks' and global traffic shaping?
Any comments on the Whitehouse Cybersecurity proposal released last week?
There are a lot of efforts related to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). How do you see them going? Will SIP rule the roost? Is the wireline "plain old telephone service" phone going to be obsolete any time soon, at home, at work, or both? Will VoIP look like part of the Internet to the consumer, or will it be part of the obscure infrastructure?
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Al (and Clinton) shoveled massive amounts of federal dollars into producing the Internet. If not for their strong pushing of spreading the Internet all over (starting in educational institutions), we wouldn't be anywhere near where we are today.
Yes, Al misspoke. But he was also crucial to the Internet being what it is today, so he gets some points.
May we never see th
What's up with that WorldCom thing? Did you personally get burned by any of this? Are you ashamed to have worked for those people? Do you think it has it damaged the credibility of the Internet?
And in your opinion, what is it about ICANN that causes people to hate it so vehemently? Is it justified?
The internet has brought many people together to do anything from games to clubs. But one of the largest unities brought together was the Open Source movement. Did you ever fathom the idea that developers around the world would unite to share source code and develop major applications (ie - linux) that is free for all?
What are your views of the Open Source Movement?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
How do you feel about the internet going from a place of knowledge, beauty, and limitless potential to a place of Porn, Scams, and Cons? Geez, often times you can get all 3 at one site. I would think this polution of your idea to such an extent leaves a bad taste in your mouth, I know it does mine.
Finally, math books without any of that base 6 crap in them.
Someone please mod parent up. I want to see VC's answer to this.
Now, some software firms, primarily under the banner of "fighting piracy" are looking again to the pay-to-play model and trying to implement this sort of system, most notably in the .NET framework. While the initial outlay for users may be much smaller (since software packages don't need to be purchased in bulk up-front), the long-term strategy is to bring in more money to the software creator.
However, personal computers are too powerful and there are too many people interested in having software which works locally -- obtained by paying a one-time fee or nothing at all -- that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to force people and companies back into the old model.
The Internet is another matter. Computer systems used to run exclusively locally. Thanks to the work by you and your peers, where it used to be near-impossible to hook up a couple VAXes together, it became possible to link more and more computers together into the Net we have today.
Political and corporate forces are attempting to divide and control this behemoth. While the first round of attempts in the form of the dot-bomb craze failed spectacularly in commercialising and segmenting the Net, a new wave is having much more success. The Great Firewall of China and damnable legislation is cutting access. Further attempts to force hardware manufacturers to make controls available continue.
Unlike software, which has been commoditised, carrier and connection are services which cross state and national borders. Furthermore, where there are few barriers to entry in the software field, a common carrier requires incredible up-front infrastructure. Hence, there are few major carriers, all of which are regulated by both domestic and foreign governments.
It is therefore rather unlikely, even with some clever hacks such as Triangle Boy, that a return to closed loops and segments is unavoidable if the proponents are prepared to work at it, which they seemingly are.
What do you think about these developments? If your feeling is that they are anathema to the purpose of the Net (which was initially a defensive weapon and never meant to be what it has become), do you see any solutions beyond lobbying of Congressmen, which won't happen for the simple reason that the users are too dispersed as compared to those organised and deep-pocketed who would strongly control the Net?
woof.
We seem to have a world of internet have and have nots.
The biggest set of have nots are still those who have not in respect of anything (the third world). We have the 'ring of fire' around Africa, but that's only really useful for the countries with a shoreline. Do you think your efforts for intra-planet internet-working would help to provide better satellite based access for making ISP's cheaper.
Is the internet's biggest need right now adding a couple of interplanetary satellites to the net (very glamorous of course) or making it more secure, decreasing abuse (i.e. spam), and increasing access to high-speed connections? I'd say people's time, $, and energy would be better spent on less flashy but far more useful endeavors such as those.
Sounds like Mr. Cerf has reached the dabbling stage of his career.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
As more and more crimes become committed on the internet, what is your take on how it should be policed?
Should the law of the country where the servers are held be applied, or the law of the country of the guilty party?
Who should be the police?
TCP/IP was invented as a way of connecting disparate networks together. It has succeeded in this goal quite admirably.
XML has a similar goal. It has been used to connecting companies together who have different internal processes.
With web services and the explosion of XML based standards, what thoughts do you have on wether or not XML will succeed? What are its strengths and shortcomings when put along side of TCP/IP?
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Did you design the Internet for p0rn or mp3s?
Back when the internet (as we now it) was being developed, it was a government military project.
However, after the internet revolution (of the early 90's) freed it from being Arpa-Net, we had a "golden age" where anyone could connect, and anyone with enough technical know-how could run a server and become a permanent part of the system.
But now we see a day looming in the future where large media conglomerates control it all through draconian service agreements that dis-allow private individuals to run servers in their homes, as well as "linking lawsuits", and patents of obvious business methods, all resulting in an internet where the vast majority of the people can only passively view information rather than interactively take part in providing information.
Do you think it's a "good thing" for everyone to run servers (an internet of the people), or do you believe that it's better for the government and corporations to control the flow of information to citizens (an internet for the people).
While it seems an obvious choice, remember that the situation we have now, where the internet is the "wild west" and mailboxes are littered with spam, and internet rumours become accidental news stories, is a direct result of an internet "of the people".
So there are pros and cons either way. Basically the question boils down to "do you prefer the wild west" versus "do you prefer a controlled, moderated internet?"
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The IETF is an amazingly transparent organization that has consistently "delivered the goods" with almost no back-room politics. ICANN is its exact opposite, perhaps reaching a nadir when one of its own board members had to sue to see the financial records. Why doesn't ICANN operate in a completely transparent manner? Do you feel the slightest bit uncomfortable with its policies and procedures? Given your background, Welch's comments in the McCarthy Army hearings come to mind.
Do you think your work would have benefitted from consideration of "Software Patents" or would it have been an incumberance and distraction? Would you have liked to have patents on the Internet so that every node or packet would have to pay royalities? Even if it would have made you (or, more likely, your employer) 'Richer n' Bill'? Lastly, any thoughts on the One-Click-Purchase Patent?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
So why didn't you dub it the Vinternet?
]
And, I'm sure you find some issues troubling. I would be interested in your views of SPAM. Did you anticipate it? What do you think about it? And do you have any ideas on how it can be managed or controlled (or, better yet, stopped)?
How is that a misquote? A normal person hearing those words would think that Al "Clipper is wonderful" Gore was claming he invented the Internet.
How else do you parse the words "I took the initative in creating the Internet.">
What, if any, enhanced form of QoS would you have included in TCP/IP?
May we never see th
Mr Cerf,
What do you see as the largest promise of improvement of the Internet? Specifically, what would you like the Internet to be in 20 years?
best regards,
Jeppe
Stop the brainwash
Dr. Cerf, I'm curious to know about what security plans you're considering for the interplanetary network you propose. It's fairly obvious that there has to be something better than present-day Net security involved, otherwise it would be possible for a garden-variety script kiddie to DoS an entire planet (at least to the extent of cutting off its "upstream" link). And might these security plans offer us some possible ways of dealing with network attacks here on Earth as well?
Be who you are...and be it in style!
Surfing the net? Any relationship there? I cannot think of any other water related metaphors related to the internet... is your name responsible?
A number of people that I talk to either consider the internet to be something "just for those computer nerd types", or they think it's the ultimate medium from which all things will eventually derive.
My question is how important a place in society is the internet now, and what do you expect its place to be in the future?
What is your favorite meal that your wife cooks?
What is her favorite meal that you cook?
Reciepes?
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Most people that I run into in the corporate IT world all know/love/use NAT (network address translation). However, as much as NAT conserves IP addresses and provides a measure of inbound-connection security, I've also seen it be the cause many problems because too many sites that have to interconnect are running overlapping IP space. This isn't even counting the number of tools or protocols that have been broken by NAT (even if they're "fixed" in smarter versions of NAT that know layer 3 or 4 protocols; eg traceroute, ftp).
Since the IP protocols were originally built around the idea of unique addresses, I'm wondering if you think NAT has been a beneficial kludge or a curse. Do you think IP should have been had a built-in NAT mechanism allowing for a more protocol-friendly NAT?
Will the (eventual) adoption of the larger address space of IPv6 lead to the elimination of NAT? Should it?
Dr. Cerf,
I'm curious about your views on a couple of 'hot-button' topics. First, spam and spammers: How would you choose to deal with the problems created by both, assuming you were in a position to dictate such policy?
Second, building on the first question: One of the positions taken by, apparently, many SysAdmins (myself included) is that the ability to send E-mail is a privilege, not a right (just like driving), and that said privilege is revocable on a per-network basis by the specific system's administrator(s) at any time, and for any reason, primarily because the vast majority of hosts that make up the Internet are privately owned and operated.
What is your take on this position? Valid? Invalid? Somewhere in between? Do you see the sending of E-mail being legislated into a "right" in times to come? (My belief is that, if this happens, the 'net will drown in spam in short order as blocklists become outlawed).
Thanks much.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
That's a little bit more confrontational than necessary. Perhaps if we were to ask in more civil terms we might get a reasonable response? Perhaps something like this.
ICANN is seen from the outside as a self-serving and counterproductive entity. Given your support of it, I assume you disagree. Can you give us some reasons to see differently? Perhaps explain why ICANN has such a bad public image, and why the public is wrong on these things. Why has the increasingly unanimous need for reform been ignored? How can the public come to trust ICANN if ICANN won't trust the public with information about their business?
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
Dr.Cerff would you like to see an expansion of community-run wireless networks and a concommitant addition of bandwidth to the soon-to-be-crowded 2.4 and 5 GHz "free" bandwidths? (This all assumes that you're not happy with how the internet has become dominated by monopolistic cable companies)
What do you believe is going to happen to all the dark fiber that has been installed by Worldcom and others? It seems clear at this point that fiber networks have been grossly overbuilt, and demand for much, if not most, of this fiber is not about to materialize, at least within the context of current applications and cost structure. In your opinion, does this situation represent a massive loss of investment, or a tremendous opportunity to sell innovative new services, e.g. intercity video teleconferencing links which are cost-competitive with voice-only conferences?
Are innovations that could take advantage of this fiber likely to be stifled as a result of the current dependence of the telecom industry on high bandwidth charges? If this were a pure supply-and-demand situation, one might expect the cost to access dark fiber to sink like a rock until people were willing to pay for it, allowing small, entrepreneurial companies to begin to offer speculative new services. Does all that fiber remain dark only because the small number of fiber owners are unwilling to allow such price declines to happen?
you led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet.
On a related note...
Spam is growing out of control and many
administrators now consider SMTP/email to
be broken by design.
Did the problem of unsolicited email, forged
addresses and falsified mail headers ever occur
in the early design of SMTP/email?
What was the opinion on internet abuse and
forgery back in the early days?
Do you think there is a possibility to replace
SMTP with a new design?
------------------
You may like my a cappella music
It brought the net to the masses.
It brought pr0n to the masses!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
I keep running into the concept that some technological revolutions were 'inevitable'. Per this theory, SOMEONE would have invented the cotton gin, even if Eli Whitney had died young. But then I look at Tesla and alternating current and I truly wonder if anyone else on the planet could have done what he did.
I'm curious as to whether or not you think the Internet, or something like it, was inevitable? What were the crucial success points? Were there individual places where, without someone being truly and irreplaceably brilliant, the Internet would not have come to be?
How on earth could you parse it to come up with 'invent' - oh yes you take it to the Cato institute and ask for their intepretation. This is actually what happened as has been repeatedly documented, Declan wrote his mendatious piece in Wired, which somehow ended up with the headline 'Gore claims to invent Internet' - I do not know if Wired online has sub-editors to write headlines. Declan then took the piece to his then friend at Cato and got a response on it, then he re-reported his original piece by reporting on the Cato release and Gingrich's office but failed to mention he was the source of the original claim. He also failed to make any attempt to talk to the Gore campaign.
The Declan smear was a calculated and deliberate strategy on the part of the Bush campaign to deny Gore the chance to use one of his biggest achievements in the Senate and Whitehouse. It was repeated by the Republican media long after it had been disproved.
The way to parse the sentence by the way is to observe that 'to take the initiative' has a very specific meaning in Senate terms. It means to be a principal sponsor of a bill or ammendment. Gore was the principal sponsor of most Internet related bills and in particular the bill that funded the NSFNet backbone that created the first Internet.
The Internet was not an invention, it was a network that was initially funded by government money. Packet switching was an invention, the Internet is a specific instance of the invention.
Gore clearly did not intend to claim that he had any part in the technical development of the Internet.
As for how a 'normal' person might misinterpet the statement, I don't think anyone but a rabid libertarian would imagine that the government had no part in the creation of the Internet. Even if Gore did mis-speak on that occasion how many times has Bush misspoken? How many times has he been called on it. Bush described the senate as 'not interested in national security' eight times before he got called on it last week and the people who claimed that it is unpatriotic for senators to even defend themselves from Bush's partisan attack are the same ones who made such an issue of Gore's statement.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
But this is the same Al Gore who said that Love Story was written about him.
That's because IT WAS. The author Eric Segal confirmed that Gore and Tommy Lee Jones were the inspiration for the male lead.
Yet the media and the dittohead drones never paid him any notice. After all, what would the author of the book know?
Much as I hate to burst your bubble here, what Gore actually said was that a newspaper had reported that Gore and Tipper were the role models for Love Story. This was true, the newspaper did print the story.
The author later issued a correction, he did not base a character on Tipper. He did however base the male guy on Gore.
This is not very suprising since the author was a good friend of Gore and Gore's sister was dying of lung cancer caused by smoking when the book was being written.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/h033099_1.shtml
Nor is the quote particularly boastful, from the original story:
POOLEY AND TUMULTY: Around midnight, after a three-city tour of Texas last month, the Vice President came wandering back to the press compartment of Air Force Two. Sliding in behind a table with the two reporters covering him that day, he picked slices of fruit from their plates and spent two hours swapping opinions about movies and telling stories about old chums like Erich Segal, who, Gore said, used Al and Tipper as models for the uptight preppy and his free-spirited girl friend in Love Story; and Gore's Harvard roommate Tommy Lee Jones, who played the roommate of the Gore-like character in the movie version of Segal's book...
Uptight Preppy?
Henneberger of the Sunday New York Times went off to interview Segal on the issue:
HENNEBERGER: The character of the preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was modeled on both Mr. Gore and his college roommate, the actor Tommy Lee Jones.
What has this got to do with Vint? Well Gore got the funding for an awful lot of Vint's work.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
about 5.95 million actually...
Wrong analogy, who knows the architect of the Ronald Reagan Federal Building, Ronald Reagan National Airport or Cape Kennedy launch site?
The person who commissions a project is far more likely to get recognition than anyone else, even if they use someone else's money.
Gore was asked what contribution he had made as a politician he gave a completely truthful answer. The Republican party deliberately distored that answer.
The same liars want to start a war and their argument is that we have to trust them. Unfortunately we simply cannot trust them because they have lied to us on the effect of their tax cut on the budget deficit, lied to us on nuclear wast storage in Nevada and lied to us about the case for war:
"I would remind you that when the inspectors first went into Iraq and were denied -- finally denied access [in 1998], a report came out of the Atomic -- the IAEA -- that they were six months away from developing a weapon. I don't know what more evidence we need." George W Bush
Unfortunately that is not what the report says, as you can see for yourself here.
If you are a pathological liar the very best strategy is to go out and brand your opponent a liar.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Dear Mr. Cerf
:P
Recently, when reading you're opinions it seems as though you've basically taken the opposite tack that people like Mr. Postel did when it comes to things like the internet domain name system. For example, you seem to support ICANN despite the fact that that it's basically made itself unaccountable, and, well, sucks in general. You also seem to support the Intellectual property industry in their attempts to control the Internet and computing devices in general.
My question to you is: Do you see any value in the internet as a communications medium that gives everyone a voice, without censorship, or do you feel that such a system is to harmful in its current state? Should the Internet be controlled by a small elite and by earth's mega corporations?
Also, I'd like to hear a good defense of ICANN, if that's possible.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
How do you feel about internet censorship in places like China, and Saudi Arabia? Recently the Chinese government began knocking (for a short time) people off the internet who did google searches for politically sensitive terms. Do you feel this is morally wrong? Do you think that it has any chance of succeeding?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We already know what the future of IP will be, IPv6. Already deployed widely in Asia, and available in the Linux kernel, etc.
If you have some specific arguments as to why IPv6 doesn't solve the problems you seem to exist, maybe you should bring those up, rather then making sweeping, yet meaningless, metaphors about wheels with holes in them.
Also, IP is NOT Broadcast at all. It's packet switched. Geez.
(Please, someone mod this down)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What do you think about the current situation on the internet, with users down the bottom and servers up the top? Do you think that the internet should be without a heirarchy so anyone can run a server with high bandwidth?
When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? How has that vision for your own future impacted your present?
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Mr. Cerf,
:)
/. my favorite . )
It seems like a short time since everything started out at CERN - did things evolve as your expected? And how du your think the future of the digital age / internet will evolve ?
Very hypothetical and yet so breathtaking
--
El_Jake (
In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.
Or a better scheme. Mixing node addresses with network addresses makes for some amusing and clever binary math, but also makes it difficult to efficiently with addresses.
Since much of the node space is "lost" in trying to save subnets, I hate to say it, but I kind of like the idea of splitting network and node into seperate components, ala IPX. Even if you went with the size of IPX addresses (32 bits address, 48 bits node) we'd have far fewer addressing problems than we do now, and everybody would have a lot more addresses at their disposal. DSL users that get a single IP now would effectively have an entire 48 bit network at their disposal; businesses that get an entire class C could effective have a class B address (254) with a node count of 254 * 2 ^ 48, I'd wager higher than the internet as a whole.
A new concept of "flexible node routing" could be introduced to allow for routers to actually route on node addresses for places that were assigned a network number but would like to internally divide their node numbers into a network:node component internally.
Part of the problem with IP now is not the limit of IP addresses, but the limit of 253 nodes per subnet. With modern switches, there's little reason *not* to run 500-1000 nodes per subnet. Its less hassle and makes for simpler and more flexible topologies, not to mention faster and less expensive connections between cores and leaf nets.
Oh well, the simple solution would have been to just have tagged an extra 8 or 16 bits and made an IP address a little longer.
I am sure that you, like most of the rest of us, have seen the effects, both good and bad, that the internet has had upon the world.
With this in mind, especially given all of the issues surrounding p2p filesharing and intellectual property rights - if you were given the chance to do it again, knowing what you now know, would you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
The UUCP network was a mesh in its early days and evolved to be much more tree-like in the last years before its demise because of the emergence of a major provider of services. The Internet was originally intended to be mesh-like for robustness, but the emergence of a few major backbone providers seems to be making it more tree-like as well. Would you comment on mesh vs. tree for robust networks?
better is the enemy of good
You and Kahn were doing your early work on TCP in the same years that the first workstations (at Xerox Parc, for example) were being developed. I'd like to know, if you can remember, when you first began to appreciate the magnitude of this change in the internet user base, and whether this change had any affect on your TCP/IP design work in the late 70s.
Dr. Cerf, you're working towards a workable first cut at an Interplanetary Net for 2008. I understand that distances involved prevent the use of a TCP-like protocol, with store and forward being a more feasible approach.
What kind of routing and host naming challenges will exist in the IPN as you currently envision it and what sorts of approaches will be used to address these challenges?
Will packets themselves become intelligent self-routing containers? Will domain naming be heirarchical (and merely a superset of existing DNS to include extra-terrestrial TLDs)? Will it be feasible to dynamically update routing tables?
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Dear Vint Cert
The current American telecom infrastructure is a two meter width trunk tree with ten leaves to support it. The telecommunication companies have buried large amounts of fiber optic cable for metropolitan, Interstate, and international links all over the lands and less than ten percent is in use because there is no need by the people who own the fiber.
I think we can agree that all telecommunication carriers are monopolies. Instead of having one monopoly like there was with AT&T, there are now a dozen or more monopolies who own their own cable within their own areas. Whoever owns the line is the only one who can provide service.
It is impossible to have any sort of service competition to individual customers when any one entity owns the communication circuit to and from your home. Wireless is a hope, but the limited spectral frequency range as allocated by the FCC makes even the air a monopolized medium.
I have been on both sides of the wire and I am a very frustrated individual. I have worked for the ILEC, the CLEC, the ISP, and I am a telecom customer. The inability to get the service that I want is maddening. The inability to deliver service that my customers want is disappointing and putting my company out of business.
How do we fix this problem? I do not care how much it costs. I do not care how long it will take. It needs to get done and we need to get working on this now.
When I say telecom I mean voice, data, television, everything -- it does not matter any more.
Thank you